Salesforce x MrBeast, Substack TV, and OpenAI ads

What happens when one of the world’s biggest enterprise software companies partners with one of the world’s biggest creators? We’ll find out on February 8, when MrBeast teams up with Salesforce for its Super Bowl ad. The partnership started publicly in late December when MrBeast tweeted that he had an idea for a Super Bowl spot, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff replied almost immediately. This week, Salesforce released a teaser in the form of an influencer-style vlog documenting MrBeast’s journey to making the ad. MrBeast is already a Salesforce customer and uses Slackbot in his operations. While celebrities have long dominated Super Bowl commercials, creators now rival them in reach, trust, and cultural relevance. As more brands lean into creator-driven storytelling, Salesforce may be offering a blueprint for the future of Super Bowl ads, one where creators, not celebrities, take center stage.

Substack announced the launch of Substack TV, a new app available on Apple TV and Google TV designed to support creators who publish video. Subscribers who sign in can watch video posts and livestreams from the creators and publications they follow, browse a “For You” row featuring both subscribed and recommended videos, and open dedicated pages to explore more video content from specific publications. The move signals Substack’s continued evolution from a newsletter platform into a multichannel media company at a moment when brands and media entities are increasingly competing with traditional TV for attention. Substack is now positioning itself against platforms like YouTube and beehiiv, raising a bigger question about whether audiences and creators will adopt video on Substack when much of this content already lives on YouTube and often generates more revenue there.

OpenAI announced it will begin running ads on its free and low-cost ChatGPT Go tier, allowing more users to access its tools with fewer limits without paying, while Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad-free. Users will see ads appear at the bottom of answers when a sponsored product or service is relevant to their current conversation, and OpenAI says responses will not be influenced by advertisers, nor will user data or conversations be sold. It was only a matter of time before AI platforms adopted the same monetization playbook as social media and search. This will start to create a clear divide between LLMs that rely on advertising and those that don’t. Ads introduce a real risk of trust erosion for users and platform enshittifcation. Moreover, they raise a broader cultural question: whether a tool meant for thinking, learning, and decision-making can exist outside the ad-driven economy that has already reshaped media, search, and television.

NowThis acquired Salary Transparent Street, the creator-led franchise built by Hannah Williams that began as a social series asking everyday people what they do and how much they earn to normalize pay transparency and demystify money conversations for Gen Z. What started as a simple street interview format will now be scaled across NowThis’s platforms, including short-form and long-form video, live events, merch, and revived educational formats, with Williams staying on as host and creative lead. This acquisition signals a broader shift in how culture-forward media is built and scaled, with creator-led social movements being folded into mainstream narrative infrastructure. Cultural authority is no longer owned solely by editorial institutions but is shared with creators who activate lived experience, marking a moment in which creators are recognized not just as entertainers but as cultural builders.

A viral creator named Shane Geller has teamed up with a $1 digital marketplace called bucksoup in an experiment to build a million-dollar creator-led business powered by content and community. The project turns the creator journey itself into a shoppable case study, underscoring an emerging trend where creators aren’t just storytellers but founders and operators of commercial ecosystems that bypass traditional retail models. This reflects a larger shift in the creator economy toward ownership and sustainable monetization beyond traditional sponsorships and signals one of the many ways individual creators are transforming audience trust into direct economic value.

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